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notices and features - Date published:
8:46 am, November 27th, 2010 - 23 comments
Categories: education, uk politics -
Tags: protest, student fees
I’ve been meaning to write about the unrest in the UK for some time – but here’s a great summary from I/S. — r0b
The UK government is currently trying to balance its budget by shifting costs onto the young, through a trebling of university fees. This will prevent many kids from poor families from going to university, and they’re not happy about it. High school and university students walked out of their classes across the UK today in protest, marching in the streets and occupying university buildings (usually with the support of staff). Deputy Prime Minister David Clegg was hung in effigy outside The Guardian offices, where he was due to speak. In London, the students tried to march on Parliament, but the police, having learned nothing from last year’s G20 protests and still locked in a mindset which sees the public as the enemy and protest as sedition which must be violently suppressed, kettled them. Thousands of children were trapped in the freezing cold for hours, denied their freedom of speech and their freedom of movement. The result was entirely predictable: broken windows, fires, a vandalised police van, and more than a dozen arrests for violent disorder.
That’s the thing about kettles: they raise the temperature and pressure. That’s why both the Chief Inspector of Constabulary and the UK’s Independent Police Complaints Commission recommended the tactic be discontinued. The London police have ignored those recommendations. And they have only themselves to blame for the results.
The current rise of populism challenges the way we think about people’s relationship to the economy.We seem to be entering an era of populism, in which leadership in a democracy is based on preferences of the population which do not seem entirely rational nor serving their longer interests. ...
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Back in the mid-00’s it was feared the world of debt was unsustainable and that the house of cards would collapse. This wold then lead to governments doing all they could to prop up the system in order to preserve their own power and not get voted out. This would of course fail and the meltdown would continue, leading to political unrest. (this was my own view anyway).
It has pretty much panned out exactly like this, with this UK turmoil fitting the last part of the pattern.
What would happen next was a little uncertain in my mind except that the unrest would lead to ruptures and changes in the geopolitics world etc.
The last part is being played out now. The world is changing beneath our feet. Pack the sandbags, load the stores, keep the ammo at hand. Or a version thereof.
It was the belief amongst my friends who experienced kettling back in Thatcher’s time, that it wasn’t a strategy to contain violent protest as claimed, but a strategy of provocative policing. After significant violent retaliation by the protesters, the Tory politicians can use the media images of it to demonise the protesters.
But on the video of the protest that I watched on The Guardian site, there were differences of opinion amongst the demonstrators as to whether they should be trashing the police van, left aboandoned in the middle of the protest. One protester said, that the police van was rusty and had been left there deliberately so the protesters would trash it. The aim of this being to produce negative images of the protest for the media.
Some young students will be put off by the violence and buckle to the Tory will. But many of these young people are being politicised, and will be developing a cynical and critical attitude towards the way the police and media support the might of the Tory establishment.
The news report that I saw focussed on the one or two who were trashing the van and the smashing of windows. Clearly students are just a bunch of whining vandals! They deserve nothing! Funny how in NZ unions and beneficiaries are portrayed in the same tone. A conservative strategy?
The Hun, the Yellow Peril and the Red Under the Bed, the Muslim as extremist, the feminist as man-hating lesbian, anarchism as chaos…maybe a conservative strategy, but not one limited to the Conservatives.
At G20 police provocateurs mingled with the protestors to ramp things up but were busted because of their police issue boots:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19928
That is just sickening.
I am not going to get into any dialogue on this today as there is a lot to do, but simply remind everyone that this is an engineered collapse of our society by an unelected authority .
Government or Public? it does not matter to which you belong. We both get our orders and have dutifully carried out our naive and ignorant roles. As Mr Zimmerman says, ‘you gonna serve somebody’ .
History is overflowing with lessons we choose to forget or for some reason actually ignore.
It is time to wake up and stop the unnecessary annihilation of our liberty.
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The Wall Street Journal’s take on the London protests is that they were “mild” in comparison with other European anti-austerity protests.
UK student protest “mild” according to the WSJ.
“Though the violence was mild by the standards of recent protests in European countries such as France and Greece, the day marked the first major round of what is expected to be a period of large-scale protests against the Conservative-led coalition government’s budget cuts.”
capcha – “continuation”
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Nina Power on the student protests in the UK
capcha – “FLYING”
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Particularly interesting and worthwhile is the following link to the New Statesman;
Young and Scared
This link is valuable as is it from the front line of the student protests, by a young woman writer laurie Penny.
capcha – “principles”
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NUS Exec. split over Millbank occupation
While the media has given huge coverage to the few student leaders who have condemned the Millbank occupation as violent and the work of a few outsiders ie non-student extremists.
Other student union leaders have signed a statement in support of the Millbank protests.
As part of a deliberate policy to demonise, isolate and victimise the students who who made it into the Millbank building, the Main Stream Media has ignored this official statement from NUS leaders supporting the MIllbank occupation.
The statement goes on to say:
The statement was produced by Mark Bergfeld, who sits on the NUS NEC.
As well as being signed by student union leaders the statement has also been signed by Alex Callinicos, a professor at King’s College London.
The statement accuses the authorities of indulging in a witch hunt and calls for solidarity with those arrested, and states that the charges of violence are overstated.
Union Representatives Signed Statement in Support of Millbank Protests
capcha – “usually”
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Good write up at Lenin’s tomb
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2010/11/spontaneous-massive-and-militant.html
with a nice compile of footage from the Groaniad.
I’m still waiting for I/S to respond to LS who says he pretty much made the post up:
http://libertyscott.blogspot.com/2010/11/idiot-savant-wrong-about-london-student.html#links
LOL, LS doing a selective, ideologically driven blog criticising I/S for a selective ideology-driven blog. I/S’s views aren’t just those of the SWP, but of many journalists who were present, including those of some Guardian and Independent articles I have read, and letters from parents, lecturers and students to the papers, not to mention first hand reports in publications like the New Statesman.
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2010/11/children-police-kettle-protest
The students were protesting, not just against rises in tuition fees, but cuts to things like disadvantaged student maintenance grants. Also there is concern about plans to access, many social science, arts & humanities courses, and in a context where it’s going to be increasingly harder to get jobs.
This Guardian article puts the protests in context:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/24/students-and-markets-undermine-case-for-cuts
You vote for nasty, brutish government, you get nasty, brutish policies… Honestly England, did you learn nothing from watching us for the past two years?
That’s not completely fair. The UK has been stuck with FPP and it’s people have had to bear it. There were more people that voted labour and libs than conservatives. But the way FPP panned out the conservatives held the power balance.
Great pics here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1332811/TUITION-FEES-PROTEST-Students-streets-girls-leading-charge.html
…although the article is unsuprisingly shite. The revolution is going to be fashionable at least!
What’s with the placards at anarcho’s link, saying, LOL JK? Do the UK protesters know something about our PM that we don’t know?
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=jk
for those with a particular interest in this fight, this site seems to be the focus point for organinsing/announcing etc:
http://educationactivistnetwork.wordpress.com/
“Scotland Yard is under pressure after video footage emerged of police officers on horseback charging a crowd of protesters during a demonstration against increases in university tuition fees, 24 hours after they denied that horses charged the crowd.”
Here’s The Guardian link with the footage of the charging mounted police. Totally sickening.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/nov/26/student-protests-police-under-fire
You cannot trust the statements that the authorities release.
Now when you look at the sentence I just wrote above, you know we are all in deep shit.